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Are there any good resources on the tables behind the SAS entities, ERD's, and the enumeration?

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Recently I am back to working with the SAS version of BC on the functional side. My prior data experience was having direct access to the NAV tables via SQL, and if I had PK/FK or enumeration questions, there were a few places I could look online if things weren't obvious. It looks like I will be moving into doing some Power BI reporting and I have been told that the data is now obfuscated and that some BC entities are more like SQL views.

Are there any good resources out there that explains what is going into the entities, enumeration definitions, table relations, ERD, anything...

thanks for your help!

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Are there any good resources on the tables behind the SAS entities, ERD's, and the enumeration?

Thanks for the resource, Yun. Perhaps I may use that some time.

Inge M. Bruvik, appreciate your response too. I decided to try the docker route and connect through SSMS. All good, but I am curious about what I am seeing. I am hoping you can shed some light. The database looks so different than what I remember from my on-prem days. I am seeing three databases: CRONUS, Default, and Tenant.

The CRONUS DB does not have that many tables in it, and the Default and Tenant databases appear to be the same. Which DB should I be looking at?

I am presuming the "my company" company that it created is a default thing.

I was also surprised to see some type of GUID in the table name, but I guess if it is a SAS platform now, it makes sense. In the old days, it was something like dbo.[company name$Purchase Header], and now it is "My Company$Purchase Header$528avh1g-84gg-457d-962a-df2bb92540936". If a developer needs to add a column to a table, does Microsoft allow direct access to that table, or does the developer now have to make a copy of that table and modify that instead?

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YUN ZHU 89,830 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Are there any good resources on the tables behind the SAS entities, ERD's, and the enumeration?

Hi, maybe you can also try the following directly.

https://bcentral.dev/

Hope this helps

Thanks.

ZHU

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Inge M. Bruvik 1,035 Moderator on at

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Are there any good resources on the tables behind the SAS entities, ERD's, and the enumeration?

In general I think you have two options.

You can install a OnPrem version of Business Central f,.ex. using Docker. Then you will have access to the SQL database. And the datastructure will be the same as what you see in the Cloud version.

Your other option is to install Visual Studio code and connect that to your Business Central online sandbox.

Then you can install the AL Object designer add-in for Visual Studio code. Then you can go look at the object structure pretty much like you were used to doing on the object designer in the earlier versions.

Personally I use a combination of both of these methods.

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